Apologies
by Shadowed Mediocrity
Summary: Yoh gets angry. Anna gets angry. Neither will say sorry, especially not on Valentine's Day. But there are ways other than speaking to get your point across... [Yoh x Anna One-Shot] [Commemorating a Saint's Decapitation]


**Author's Note**: This is what you get for crossing me, Valentine's Day, Shaman King, and a ton of _really_ cynical comments about V-Day. Thankfully, I only included the minorly snarky ones. Enjoy the fact that I've written two fics in one day, and that my brain is dyiiing slooowwwlyyyy. :)

**Disclaimer: **If I owned Shaman King, it would have a better ending. And Funbari no Uta would have English translations by now. Nyeah.

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Apologies

It was an odd sensation, to be angry.

And yet he was. (And over something as trivial as being unable to buy a CD, too.)

It just went to show how much he'd changed.

Anna should have been proud, he thought, and his lips curled slightly upwards in the rare moment of bitterness that he allowed himself. Anna had always been after him to find a backbone, to find rules in his own life and stick to them.

But Anna was, probably, too angry to speak. Just as he was.

_And Anna never says sorry._

-

"Aww, Anna!" His expression remarkably disconcerted. "Can't I _please—"_

"No."

"_Please_—"

"No."

"PLEAS—"

Eyes cold, narrowing, thinner than the skein of her patience. "What did I just say?"

"No…" He grumbles, reluctantly. Fingers threading through the plastic of his orange headphones, and for the first time, the glow of anger in his eyes against the girl he's heeded all his life.

"And why aren't you listening?"

Their eyes meet. As usual, he can only look for an instant before dropping away.

She turns away, lips drawn, tight, a thread of white that needs only to be plucked to break.

He leaves the room without speaking.

-

They did not celebrate Valentine's Day. (_It's a day commemorating the decapitation of a Western saint._ Anna had said. _With commercialistic chocolate. There is no reason for celebration._ He had wanted to accuse her of quoting, but did not quite dare, not with the memory of her last encounter with him still stinging crimson upon his cheek.) Nevertheless, his hands itched with the desire to create that did not often come upon them, and therefore made it all the more tempting to do something.

He glanced nervously at the clock, a sidelong, ingrained instinct that came with having dwelt with his fiancé for so long. Three hours before she would be home. (She had gone out, with a dark glower pointedly not directed at him, to do the grocery-shopping for the week. They were still off speaking terms.) Three hours.

And suddenly he was filled with the urge to create, to fill the void of what had been destroyed.

-

She came home to a house so filled with quiet that it seemed almost empty. Certainly it would have appeared so to a casual eye. But she had attuned herself to his presence long, long ago, when the both of them had been young and as of yet unshaped into a certain form by the eye of the world. And even now, when the pretense of contempt slid slickly from each of her austerely graceful movements, even now she could not bring herself to change the situation.

_How odd_, she thought, but did not think more of it; Yoh was permitted to be silent if he liked, and in any case she did not care. He had yet to apologize for his uncouth, sullen silence; had yet to speak to her at all this week. And if she were a little peeved by the fact of his defiance, well, it was but a small thing, and she could tolerate small things if they occurred in equally minute amounts of time.

The blonde strode into the kitchens, head held high with a cool arrogance against the chance that he might walk in and catch her in a fleeting moment of regret. And perhaps that was all to the good – it was almost certain that she would have otherwise missed the tiny fragment of white pinned neatly to a cupboard above her eye level.

Anna was not aware of her outreaching fingers and the fragile brush of those digits across the sheet. Nor was she aware that her façade had crumbled.

Nor, for that matter, did she care.

And if anyone dared to inform her differently, she would have dealt them her usual slap and they would have gone away thinking Anna wholly unaffected indeed.

The present in itself was a simple thing at first sight; a white paper carefully and intricately cut into the shape of a snowflake, then smoothed so perfectly that all of the creases necessary in creating such an elaborate design wholly vanished to the imperfections of the human eye. And upon its surface, in various languages and elegantly flowing calligraphy, were the words _Thank You_ and _Sorry_. Repetitively, they flowed across the page and melded together until all throughout her vision, the various characters and letters of every language blended until they formed a huge, convoluted figure that blurred her vision and drowned it in the near-blindness of a tear.

Tremblingly, she smiled; her hand dropped to the counter with a light thunk as a golden curtain slashed to cover her features.

"Stupid Yoh."

-

Valentine's Day was over, and there had been nothing, no sign that she had forgiven him. She had settled in to watch television without speaking, and he, grateful as he was for the brief respite from her training, had trudged wearily upstairs to face a bleak, early night.

She could look forward to a warm evening of soap operas and people screaming love-confessions to each other while all he had to look forward to was a desolate, toss-turning night in which he wondered if he had been right after all, not to apologize.

He turned the corner, let the paper-screen door slide shut, turned again, towards his thin mattress. And blinked.

On his futon was a certain amount of money, piled up in fragile towers that were easily tumbled and scattered to the four winds. A more romantic person might have arranged them in the shape of a heart. Tamao, Yoh thought, dryly and with a certain amount of wistful tenderness, certainly would have. She was both kind and impractical that way.

But Anna didn't. It was not the sort of thing that she did, and in some small way, he was grateful for it. And when he totaled up the change, the fact that the amount was exactly the price of the CD he had wanted did not escape him.

He smiled.

_Anna never says sorry._

_Most of the time because she doesn't need to._

**End**

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